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One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson

Published in 2006, this is the second of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie stories. It is subtitled A Jolly Murder Mystery. It is sometimes jolly – or at least droll – and it is sometimes a murder mystery, but it is much else besides.

The book begins with an episode of road rage in the middle of Edinburgh. The first five chapters introduce most of the main characters in the book, most of whom witness the ‘incident’. These include Martin Canning, Gloria Hatter and of course Jackson Brodie. Martin writes the sort of 1940s jolly murder mysteries disingenuously alluded to in the sub-title: ‘”Something’s up, Bertie”, Nina whispered as she balanced on Bertie’s shoulders to get a good view of Lord Carstairs in the palm-filled conservatory of Dunwrath Castle.’ Gloria is the bored wife of a dodgy property developer, Graham Hatter. She ‘wondered at what point in the transaction between Graham and a call-girl her name would crop up. Before, after – or during?’ And Jackson is in Edinburgh because his girlfriend Julia has a part in a play being staged for the Festival. ‘Jackson was ex-army, ex-police and now ex-private detective. Ex everything, except Julia.’

Genre ‘murder mysteries’ are about a crime and an attempt to solve it. There is a lot of crime in this story, some of which the police try to solve. But the emphasis is less on detection than on the changing circumstances of the characters, including the police. Martin’s ‘good turn’ lands him in the middle of a series of events that open up like the Russian matryoshka dolls that are a recurring theme in the story; in the space of three days, his whole life is turned upside down. Gloria’s life is also irreversibly changed. And Jackson, ex-private detective, starts off being an ‘innocent bystander’ but is inexorably sucked into the maelstrom of events.

Unsurprisingly the three separate stories of Martin, Gloria and Jackson – and Detective Inspector Louise Monroe and her son Archie – are linked. The links are sometimes subtle – a name mentioned in one context then appears in another, and the reader is left to muse on the suggestion of corruption spread like a web throughout the society. And there are also more robust links; as Jackson says, ‘A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen’. In general, Atkinson does a good job of making the connections arise logically out of the narrative. It is Jackson’s persistence in trying to link the different crimes (or at least some of them) that makes him the main connecting factor; ‘You say coincidence, he thought. I say connection.’ But connections within and between the other stories also contribute to the sense of the account as a totality. I didn’t see the final connection coming, and was pleased and amused by it. It rounds things off nicely.

There are few people who could see the phrase ‘one good turn’ with out completing it with ‘deserves another’. And for the most part good turns are rewarded in the story. There is however one case where I think Atkinson abandons her character a little too readily to ‘Cosmic Justice’. Or maybe she is simply making the (reasonable) point that life isn’t fair, and that what is deserved may not necessarily be forthcoming.

I enjoy good ‘conventional’ crime writing (think Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series), so I mean no disrespect when I say that Kate Atkinson’s writing goes beyond genre crime fiction. I think this is because, no matter how intricate her plots, her focus is on character rather than crime. Other opinions please.

[…] my earlier posts on the books Case Histories, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News? here, here and here. A further two episodes of Case Studies based on the fourth Jackson Brodie novel Started […]